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OS X 10.9 Mavericks: The Ars Technica Review

No longer an apex predator, OS X takes some time for introspection.

Purchase and installation

Lion was the first download-mostly release of OS X, and Mountain Lion was the first download-only release. Mavericks breaks no new ground in the realm of product distribution. As expected, it’s available only through the Mac App Store.

With the transition away from physical media complete, Apple is free to focus on one of the intended benefits of downloadable OS updates: adoption rate.

OS X prices, 2007-2013.

At WWDC, Tim Cook made a point of bragging about iOS’s adoption rate. After less than 10 months on the market, 93 percent of iOS users were using the latest version, iOS 6. (iOS 7 is well on its way to matching that performance, with a 64 percent adoption rate 34 days after its release.)

Earlier in the same presentation, Craig Federighi shared some less impressive statistics about Mountain Lion adoption: 35 percent after six months. Did it pass 90 percent four months later? If it did, I imagine Apple would have said so.

After eliminating the trip to the store (or the package delivery), the other major knob Apple can turn to drive adoption of new OS X releases is the price. And turn it has, dropping the price of the Mac operating system steadily over the past five years, hitting $19.99 with Mountain Lion. Mavericks follows the trend to its logical conclusion, finally joining iOS at the magical price point of free. Mac users who are still stubbornly clinging to Snow Leopard are unlikely to be dislodged, but anyone running Lion or Mountain Lion is sure to feel the gravitational pull of an OS upgrade that’s just one click and $0 away.

In a refreshing change of pace, Mavericks does not cut off support for any additional Mac hardware. If your Mac can run Mountain Lion, it can run Mavericks. For completeness, here’s the list of supported models:

Like its feline ancestors, a single copy of Mavericks can be installed on “each Apple-branded computer […] that you own or control” plus two additional copies within virtual machines. There’s still no DRM, no serial numbers, and no product activation. I know I repeat this every year, but it’s worth emphasizing. Despite having arguably built a large portion of its current digital media empire on the back of its FairPlay copy protection system, Apple still seems to view DRM as a net negative that should be avoided, when possible.

Branding

Time was when I’d review OS X branding trends by lining up images of cardboard product boxes or optical discs. After the transition to download-only, Apple’s marketing materials and website must fill the gap. Our first glimpse of Mavericks branding was on a banner visible just before the WWDC 2013 keynote.

Mavericks banner at WWDC 2013.

Pierre Rothmaler

The thin “X” is an obvious echo of iOS 7’s design—despite the fact that, as we would soon find out in the keynote, Mavericks does not adopt the iOS 7 interface style. Apple’s website revealed what would become the more common logo for the OS.

The “X” is thinner than in the past, but not quite iOS-7 thin. It’s placed inside a circle that initially reads like an optical disc—or does if you’re a Mac user of a certain age, anyway. But sometimes a circle is just a circle. Behind it, showing through the logo, is the attractive new default desktop image showing a wave, presumably from the eponymous surfing location.

I’m mentioning all of this not (just) because I’m interested in how Apple markets its products, but because the branding of Mavericks reveals a tension that appears in both the aesthetic and functional design of the OS itself. Mavericks is not iOS 7, but it’s also not Mountain Lion. Mavericks doesn’t get an all-new interface, but it surely can’t carry on with many of its bundled applications looking like iOS 6 doppelgängers. In the next section, we’ll see how Apple manages this tension.

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John Siracusa
John Siracusa has a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Boston University. He has been a Mac user since 1984, a Unix geek since 1993, and is a professional web developer and freelance technology writer. Emailsiracusa@arstechnica.com//Twitter@siracusa